Title: A clustering algorithm based on elitist evolutionary approach

Authors: Lydia Boudjeloud-Assala; Ta Minh Thuy

Addresses: Laboratory of Theoretical and Applied Computer Science, University of Lorraine, Ile du Saulcy, Metz, F-57045, France ' Department of Information and Communication Technology, University of Science and Technology, Hanoi, VietNam

Abstract: The k-means algorithm is a popular clustering algorithm. However, while k-means is convenient to implement, it produces solutions that are locally optimal. It depends on the number of clusters k and initialisation seeds. We introduce a method that can be used directly as a clustering algorithm or as an initialisation of the k-means algorithm based on the cluster number optimisation. The problem is the number of parameters required to find an optimal solution. We propose to apply diversity of population maintained through different evolutionary sub-populations and to apply the elitist strategy to select only the best concurrent solution. We also propose a new mutation strategy according to the neighbourhood search. This cooperative strategy allows us to find the global optimal solution for clustering tasks and optimal cluster seeds. We conduct numerical experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms on multi-class datasets, overlapped datasets and large-size datasets.

Keywords: data exploration; optimisation approach; elitist approach; clusters number; clustering; spherical clusters; ellipsoidal clusters.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBIC.2017.087922

International Journal of Bio-Inspired Computation, 2017 Vol.10 No.4, pp.258 - 266

Accepted: 07 Aug 2016
Published online: 10 Nov 2017 *

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